Category Archives: El Salvador

Last 3 February
2019 presidential elections were held in El Salvador. The young politician
Nayib Bukele, 37, was elected president after running as candidate of the Grand
Alliance for National Unity (GANA). These elections are significant for several
reasons. Firstly, the two-party dominance in the executive office of the last 30
years was broken. The right wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) ruled
the country from 1989 to 2004, whilst the leftist Farabundo Martí National
Liberation Front (FMLN) did from 2009 and 2014. These were rivals back in the
1980s during the civil war. This makes their defeat ever more symbolic.

Secondly, this electoral process shows features similar to those we recently find in different elections around the globe: little credibility in traditional political parties, and a politician who presents himself as an anti-establishment candidate who uses a populist discourse and resorts to social networks as key platform to communicate his message. In addition, as in last year’s presidential election in Brazil, Bukele competed as the candidate of a small political party who welcomed his skills and popularity as a way to reach for the first time the executive office.

Like its
predecessors, Bukele’s government will have to face structural political and
economic problems that will limit its presidential powers. Moreover, he will
have to face a divided government situation. In a still very conservative
society, the president-elect will have to exert control over politicians from
older generations and different political backgrounds in both his cabinet and his
party fraction in the Legislative Assembly.

A frail economy, high insecurity and corruption scandals erode confidence in traditional parties

In 1992, the
Peace Accords were signed between the government of El Salvador and the FMLN
guerrilla. One of the most successful aspects of this negotiation was the
institutionalisation of the guerrilla as a political party. Since 1994, the
first year in which it participates in legislative elections—in El Salvador the
legislative elections are held every three years and the presidential ones
every five years—the FMLN has constituted itself as the second largest party in
the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, behind of the right-wing ARENA—founded
in 1981. In 2009, the FMLN reached the presidential office for the first time
with media figure Mauricio Funes as a candidate and in 2014 it won again with
Salvador Sánchez Cerén. Although this party had a Marxist leaning as a guerrilla
group, since the mid-1990s it has moved towards the centre.

Due to the dominance of the presidential elections by ARENA and the FMLN in the last three decades, several commentators refer to this period as a bipartisan system. However, while the two parties are the strongest forces in the Legislative Assembly, this is a relatively fragmented legislature. There are 84 seats but no party has won the necessary number of seats to form simple majority, none of them has obtained more than 35 seats in a single election. The effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP) index—or number of parties that have effective decision-making power—on average between 1994 and 2015 has remained at 3.46[1]. In other words, normally the Executive has no choice but to negotiate. The presidential powers are hindered by separate legislative and municipal elections that become barometers of the current government performance.

Despite the success of the 1992 peace process, the structural roots that led to civil war—poverty and economic and social inequality—persist. This is compounded by the increasing social violence since the 1990s. El Salvador has one of the highest homicides rates on the planet and insecurity has become part of everyday life in this country of 6.4 million people. With the Peace Accords, thousands of Salvadorans exiled in the United States returned to their country. The US government found in the end of the civil war an excuse to deport hundreds of Salvadorans linked to criminal gangs. That was the germ of the famous Salvadoran vicious street gangs called maras. These have become so powerful that it is said that today they even contribute to the financing of the main political parties. The parties, as well as private businesses, have to negotiate quotas of power in the territories where the maras operate.

Insecurity
and a weak economy that has affected the middle class in particular are two of
the factors that contribute to explain the weakening of trust in political
parties. The dollarised economy of El Salvador grows modestly. According to
the World Bank, it is one of the slowest growing countries in Central
America and poverty has only slightly decreased during the present decade. This
is largely due to Salvadorans’ high reliance on remittances, which, as
Benedicte Bull and her co-authors argue, [Business
Groups and Transnational Capitalism in Central America: Economic and Political
Strategies. New York: Palgrave MacMillian] generates few incentives for
productive activities. Extreme poverty is concentrated in rural areas. It is
not surprising then that in recent months thousands of Salvadorans from these
areas have joined the caravan of migrants that left from Honduras to the United
States. On the other hand, the government’s efforts to reduce the fiscal
deficit have led to a significant increase in various taxes which could have
impacted the incomes of the middle and lower classes, according to ICEFI, a Central
American fiscal policy think tank.

Corruption scandals are added to the pressing economic and social situation. Two ARENA ex-presidents, Francisco Flores (2004-2009) and Tony Saca (2004-2009), have been convicted of corruption. Former FMLN President Mauricio Funes (2009-2014) remains in exile in Nicaragua, where he is under political asylum status granted by the Nicaraguan government. He is requested by the Salvadoran judiciary authorities who have led an investigation on embezzlement during his government. This and the Saca’s case both are linked to a corruption scheme that diverted public funds to pay bonuses to public officials close to the presidents and their parties. Just a week ago, previous to the election, it was published that one of the persons who would have received illegal bonuses during the Funes’ government is the current President of the Republic, Salvador Sánchez Cerén. This was probably the coup de grâce to FMLN’s campaign that the supporters of the anti-corruption candidate Nayib Bukele were expecting. Nonetheless, bear in mind that somehow he has to circumvent the fact that he won under the GANA flag, a party founded by Tony Saca in 2010. In August last year, Saca declared himself guilty of corruption charges against him.

A millennial’s road to presidential office

Nayib
Bukele was born in San Salvador in 1981, in a family of Palestinian origin. His
father was an public relations businessman and Nayib took over the family
business when he was pursuing a law degree, which did not complete. In 2012, he
was elected mayor of the small city Nueva Cuscatlán, under the FMLN banner. In
2015 he again competed in local elections as a FMLN politician but this time as
mayor candidate of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. As a mayor of this
very populous city, he has carried out works of reconstruction of historical streets
and buildings, at the time that he also has promoted other works such as skateboard
parks, while increasing the police presence in the capital city. This has
contributed to galvanise his popularity among the poor and middle classes. To
this it has also contributed the open criticism to the party that led him to become
a mayor as well as his dressing style and way of approaching fans, through
social media platforms, which
many describe as millennial.

By 2016,
Bukele was already a well-known public figure in El Salvador and their presidential
ambitions were obvious. In
October that year writer Lauren Markham, reporting for The Guardian wrote that he “is met with the fanfare and
admiration of celebrity. In the past year, while reporting on the violence in
El Salvador and the exodus of citizens that it has unleashed, I’ve heard
Bukele’s name—Nayib, Nayib, Nayib—issued like a trumpet call, from schoolyards
in Oakland, California, to cornfields in El Salvador’s sun-parched east. Even
those who oppose his policies concede that he is making profound changes, and
thus, at worst, speak of him with respect”.

In September
2017 he had conflicts with councillors of ARENA and of his own party. In reaction
to this, he
accused the government of El Salvador of being more of the same like
previous ARENA governments had been. In response, in October of that year the
FMLN expelled him from the party. That same month he founded his own party,
Nuevas Ideas, but it was not until August 2018 that the Supreme Electoral
Tribunal (TSE) authorised its registration.

The
pragmatism and presidential ambition of Bukele were evident in the process that
led him to seal his candidacy with GANA. Due to the obstacles to register Nuevas
Ideas, he tried to be the candidate of the leftist Cambio Democrático, but the
TSE on 26 July 2018 cancelled its credentials on the grounds that it did not
reach the electoral threshold of minimum share of votes in the 2015 elections.
Two days later Bukele announced that he would be the candidate of the right-wing
GANA.

With
Bukele, quickly GANA was placed ahead at the top in intention of votes, well
above ARENA and the FMLN, in
at least two opinion polls. Bear in mind that Bukele since 2017 had seen
his popularity increase with the slogan “give
us back what was stolen” in allusion to the governments of ARENA and the
FMLN, and his social media campaigning.

A cloudy future

To the very
complex structural problems of Salvadoran politics, society and economy it can
be added that the new president will have to govern until 2021, accompanied by
a legislative caucus of only 10 deputies that he will have to convince of his
leadership. Remember that he officially joined GANA at last moment and it is unclear
how his caudillo politics will fit in once in government.

Indeed, both
GANA and Nayib Bukele sealed a pragmatic alliance and both have incentives to keep
it once the new government is sworn-in in June. It is also true that GANA,
whilst founded as a right-wing party, it has played a pivotal role in the Legislative
Assembly, sometimes in tune with progressive social policies of the current
FMLN government, as with the most conservative faction of ARENA. Nevertheless,
to reach simple majority agreements, the new government will necessarily have
to negotiate either with the FMLN, with 23 deputies, or ARENA that has 37
deputies and is probably ideologically closer to GANA. Currently, the speaker
of the Legislative Assembly is a deputy of ARENA and in October it will change
to a Christian Democrat legislator who will remain in office until 2021. This
situation poses a divided government situation, and considering the power
resources of the speaker one could argue that that GANA deputies will tilt
toward the right.

At the time
of writing, negotiations are taking place between Bukele’s team of the newly
created left-wing party, New Ideas and GANA. This is the first test to prove
the flexibility of the electoral coalition of the president-elect. The
team of the to-be-sworn president assures that it will be an inclusive cabinet.
Added to this situation is the international
environment. El Salvador is known for its high rates of emigration mainly to
the United States, motivated since the 1990s by deficient economic conditions.
Since the beginning of the current decade, thousands of Salvadorans have been
deported and especially during the last two years US immigration policies have
become more aggressive against immigrants. If the promises of the US president Donald
Trump are fulfilled, the Bukele government could become more complicated.
However, unlike the FMLN government, with which there have been disputes with
the government in Washington DC following El Salvador’s recent diplomatic
break with Taiwan to establish them with China, Bukele and his pragmatic allies
may be more willing to have more harmonious foreign relations with the United
States.

Last 20th August, the President of El Salvador, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, announced that his government was breaking off diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (herein forth Taiwan or the ROC) to establish them with the People’s Republic of China (China or PRC). This is the latest in a series of diplomatic defeats for the ROC, a country struggling to maintain sovereign state recognition among a few developing small states, against the will of the Chinese government who insists that Taiwan is a renegade province, and countries cannot maintain diplomatic relations with both at the same time. This is also known as the One-China policy. The Salvadoran switch takes place at the time that the PRC gradually seeks to establish itself as a hegemonic power on the international stage, while the current United States government holds a commercial war with the Chinese. Central America is quite in the middle of this game of great powers (and in the Caribbean, in 2017, the Dominican Republic also chose China over Taiwan).

In this post, I focus my analysis on the six presidential polities located in the Central American isthmus (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama), particularly, El Salvador. Besides this country two other states have established diplomatic relations with the PRC: Costa Rica, in 2007, and Panama, in 2017. It has also been speculated that the Honduran government might, in the short term, do the same. In this post I discuss how foreign policy decisions are a presidential power, which is affected by domestic politics and, particularly for small countries in strategic locations, the influence of great international powers.

A convenient way to characterize this situation is as a two-level game model, where domestic politics interact with international politics. I seek to answer, why Central American countries are cutting diplomatic ties with the ROC? Why they had them in the first place? Will more countries in this region do the same? And, does the current US-China trade war have anything to do with all this?

Foreign policy presidential powers in Central America, and the Beijing or Taipei dilemma

The countries of the Central American isthmus, except for Belize, have in common that all of them have a presidential form of government. This is, presidents and members of the legislature are elected for fixed terms, and cabinet members in the executive are not accountable to the legislature. Foreign policy is often characterized as a presidential power, not only in this region of the world but elsewhere, where polities have adopted presidentialism or some sort of semi-presidentialism. Very much like in the United States, in Central American countries foreign policy is a presidential prerogative, subject to checks-and-balances whose limits often fall into grey areas of constitutional interpretation. Yet, it is at the discretion of the president to recognize the sovereignty of other states.

The way presidents handle the international relations of their nations are not free from controversy. After the PRC became one of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council in the early 1970s, most Latin American states except for the Central American and the Caribbean ones broke diplomatic ties with the ROC to establish them with China. Colin R. Alexander (China and Taiwan in Central America: Engaging Foreign Publics in Diplomacy. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), provides an explanation of why this subgroup of nations in the Americas maintained diplomatic recognition of Taiwan over China. This is partly explained by the close ties between the government in Washington D.C. and the government in Taipei (the capital of the ROC) that was forged during the Cold War. On the one hand, it is well known that the Taiwanese government grants substantial donations for international development to governments of the few states that still recognize it as a state.

On the other hand, much is speculated about some other donations being granted informally, without going through public controls. Less evident is that, according to Alexander, among diplomatic circles in Taiwan there is talk that the United States government also makes informal donations to the governments of the Caribbean and, possibly, some Central American ones as well—i.e. countries within their geographical area of ​​influence—in order to persuade them to keep recognition of the Asian island: “it has long been suspected that the US government provides financial incentives, aid, and development assistance to its neighbors based on informal agreements that they will continue to recognize the ROC” (p. 30).

Therefore, for Central American governments there are strong historical, political and financial incentives to maintain diplomatic ties with the ROC. However, that scenario has been changing due to the PRC’s stronger role in international trade, but also because it is competing with Taiwan with a diplomacy of development aid to extend its own influence—a so-called dollar diplomacy—hence weakening the Taiwanese in Central America. In 1985, due to the ideological context of the time, the Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua gave China diplomatic recognition. Ortega’s policy towards China was abolished by the new Nicaraguan government in the early 1990s, while diplomatic relations with ROC were restored. Years later, when Ortega competed again in the 2006 elections, with clear chances of winning, he hinted to the possibility of reestablishing relations with Beijing. Nonetheless, he did not do it. It was another former president of the 1980s, Óscar Arias (1986-1990, 2006-2010), from Costa Rica, the first in Central America in breaking with Taipei over Beijing, in this new context of international relations.

Arias returned to office in 2006 and a year later, amid great secrecy, his government announced that it was diplomatically recognizing the PRC. While there was controversy at that time about this move, as one observer points out, Costa Rica—a more open economy to international markets, with a higher per capita income than its Central American neighbours—was exporting more to China than to Taiwan, and was less dependent on official development aid than its neighbours. Hence, strategically, it was probably more natural for this country to establish this diplomatic policy which came with additional benefits, such as official aid for infrastructure and investment agreements.

However, Chinese investment in other parts of Central America has increased considerably in recent years. On the one hand, this is the result of the growing investment of that country in different parts of Latin America. The investment of this Asian state is concentrated in the countries of the Southern Cone. Some analysts believe that this behaviour is partly explained by Beijing’s interest to consolidate itself as a global hegemon, although this is also due to its need for raw materials to sustain its economic growth, and the expectation to profit from some of its investments (Constantino Urcuyo, China y EE. UU. Geopolítica y estrategia en el siglo XXI, forthcoming). In Central America, the geostrategic interest of this region for the United States must be taken into account, and that this is one of the few strongholds Taiwan has left.

Political scientist Constantino Urcuyo (see last paragraph) argues that, although China has not invested in this region in the same proportion as it has in the Southern Cone, the Central American isthmus is of great economic importance for Beijing, as it connects through the Panama Canal the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans and is a transit area for Chinese trade to North America. He also adds that politically, until 2016, China and Taiwan were experiencing a truce in their diplomatic efforts regarding the One-China policy. However, since Tsai Ing-wen’s rise to the presidency of Taiwan, China has taken a more aggressive diplomatic stance seeking to weaken the former internationally.

The Monroe Doctrine, named after the United States President James Monroe in 1823, saw the intervention of Europeans in the Americas as acts of aggression. Years later, it is accentuated under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt who would justify the direct intervention of the United States in the politics of the Latin American states. It is well known the influence that the United States had in countries such as Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Puerto Rico during the first decades of the 20th century.

The United States has been observing with great suspicion the growth of the Chinese presence in the Americas. However, possibly under the Trump administration the verbal confrontations of the United States towards China have grown. Recall that even though he had not assumed, the newly elected president made an official call to the Taiwanese President, Tsai Ing-wen’s, in November 2016, breaking protocol in a confrontational attitude against China. Trump has also launched a trade war this year with countries of the European Union, Canada and Mexico. But, possibly it is with China the country with whom this type of confrontation has been more aggressive, due to the tit-for-tat tariff escalation both parts have embraced with. However, this factor may not be related to the diplomatic rupture of El Salvador with Taiwan.

The Obama administration declared the end of the Monroe Doctrine’s era (Urcuyo, forthcoming); however, under Trump’s government the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, on one occasion, in reference to the Chinese presence in the American continent, declared that the Monroe Doctrine was a success back in the day, asserting that “I think it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was written”.

The intervention of the United States in Central America is subtler in comparison to what it was even in more recent times, during the Cold War. Faced with the growing Chinese investment in the region, Trump’s government has threatened that will condition its economic support upon their maintenance of diplomatic ties with Taiwan. It did after the breakup of Panama with Taiwan in 2017, and it reiterated this a few days ago after El Salvador did the same last August. Mainly, for the countries of the Northern Triangle, the United States’ aid may be more important, due to their higher levels of poverty compared to their Central American neighbours.

An additional factor that affects the countries of the Northern Triangle in their relationship with the US is that they are expellers of migrants and their economies are very dependent on the remittances they send to their families. This factor has been changing since the Obama administration at the beginning of this decade, among other factors, due to their growing crime rates and political instability, which is why the US has tightened its border control and deportation policies.

The two-level game of the Salvadoran diplomatic switch

For the Salvadoran President, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the decision to maintain relations with Taiwan or to establish them with China represents what Robert Putnam characterizes as a two-level game, where the government has to manage a simultaneous strategy to manage the conflict in national politics and international politics.

Sánchez Cerén has been elected president of a leftist party, the former guerrilla in the 1980s, Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). El Salvador is also in a serious fiscal crisis and since the arrival of Trump has sought to relax its position, albeit unsuccessfully, on the policy of mass deportations. Hence, international aid is a significant incentive. However, Trump has been quite derogatory with El Salvador. Recall that in January 2018 Trump called “shitholes” El Salvador, Haiti and other African nations. Obviously, this was very offensive for Salvadorans.

On the other hand, it is known that Taiwan manages its own lobby groups in the countries where it has a diplomatic presence. This explains the secrecy of the negotiation between El Salvador and China. However, once the government’s decision to recognize China and break with Taiwan was announced, the biggest opposition party, the right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) declared that if they return to power after the 2019 elections, they will restore relations with Taiwan. This party has been associated with the Taiwanese lobby. However, it is difficult to know if they will keep this campaign promise, given the irregularity with which the US government is managing its diplomatic relations with El Salvador.

Can we expect more Central American countries breaking off with Taiwan?

Currently, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua are the Central American presidential countries that still maintain relations with Taipei. At least in the case of the Guatemalan and Honduran governments, there may be significant incentives for them to remain as allies of the ROC. In spite that it has been speculated that the Honduran government could be the next to recognize the PRC, as the Guatemalan government, Hondurans have proven to be closer to President Trump. For instance, last year Guatemala was the first country to follow the example of the United States and moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Both Guatemala and Honduras, in December 2017, were two of the eight countries to vote against a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly condemning that decision of the US government.

China will possibly continue with its policy of not intervening in the domestic politics of other countries, but it will probably keep investmenting in Central America. The United States, like Taiwan, could increase its aid to the countries that still recognize the ROC. Hence, a plausible scenario is that relations between those countries and the ROC continue.

Conclusions

Sovereign state recognition and, foreign policy in general, is a presidential power. However, for small countries, especially those within the influence zone of great world powers, it is a very relative power.

In this regard, the balance of forces between China and the United States has important repercussions on the domestic policies of the Central American countries. This phenomenon is more relevant due to the personality of the current US president, who has assumed a more aggressive foreign policy than his predecessors.

Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine and it is possible that in the years to come, if re-elected in 2020, he could seek to increase the US presence in Central America to prevent the remaining nations that still hold diplomatic ties with Taipei to change them over Beijing. Nonetheless, given the pressing needs of Central American governments, unless the US and the ROC increase their aid to their Central American counterparts, the temptation to break off with Taiwan will continue.

This is a guest post by Fernando Meireles, Ph.D candidate in Political Science at Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). E-mail: fmeireles@ufmg.br

In many countries, presidents have a difficult time governing because their parties lack a legislative majority. In fact, because of the combination of separate elections for executive and legislative branches with multiparty systems, this situation is far from uncommon: during the last two decades in all 18 Latin American countries with presidential systems, only 26% of the time has the president’s party had a majority in the lower house. Due to this constraint, as a vast amount of research now highlights, minority presidents usually form multiparty government coalitions by including other parties in their cabinets. Again, only four Latin American presidential countries in the last twenty years were not governed by a multiparty coalition at some point since the 1980s.

However, the need to craft a legislative majority alone does not explain why presidents frequently include more parties in their governments than necessary to obtain a minimum winning coalition – forming what I call an oversized government coalition. The distribution of this type of coalition in Latin America is shown in the graph below. As can be seen, it is not a rare phenomenon.

If government coalitions are costly to maintain, as presidents have to keep tabs on their coalition partners to ensure they are not exploiting their portfolios to their own advantage – not to mention the fact that by splitting spoils and resources between coalition partners, the president’s own party is worse off – then why are these oversized coalitions prevalent in some Latin American countries?

In a recent article in Brazilian Political Science Review, I tackled this puzzle by analyzing the emergence of oversized government coalitions in all 18 presidential countries in Latin America[1], followed by a case study focusing on Brazil, spanning from 1979 to 2012. To this end, I gathered data on cabinet composition[2] from several sources to calculate the size of each government coalition in the sample: if a coalition had at least one party that could be removed without hampering the majority status of the government in the lower house in a given year, I classified it as an oversized coalition.

Specifically, I examined three main factors that, according to previous research, should incentivize presidents to include more parties in their coalitions than necessary to ensure majority support: 1) the motivation party leaders have to maximize votes, which would make joining the government attractive to opposition parties (vote-seeking); 2) the motivation presidents have to avoid coalition defections to implement their policy agendas (policy-seeking); and 3) the institutional context, considering the effects of bicameralism, qualified majority rules, and party system format on government coalition size.

The results support some of the hypothesis suggested by the literature. First, presidents are more prone to form oversized coalitions at the beginning of their terms, which shows that the proximity to the election affects Latin American presidents’ decision to form, and opposition parties to accept being part of, large coalitions – as others studies argue, this is mainly due to parties defecting from a coalition to present themselves as opposition when elections are approaching. Second, party fragmentation also has a positive effect on the emergence of oversized coalitions, consistent with the hypothesis that presidents might include additional parties in their coalitions anticipating legislative defections. Yet on the other hand, presidential approval, party discipline, and ideological polarization do not have the same positive effects on the probability of an oversized coalition being formed.

The factor that has the most impact on the occurrence of oversized coalitions, however, is the legislative powers of the president. As the literature points out, legislative decrees and urgency bills could be used by skilled presidents to coordinate their coalitions, facilitating horizontal bargaining between coalition partners. The comparative results show that this is the case in Latin America: the difference in the predicted probability of a president with maximum legislative powers in the sample forming an oversized coalition and another with minimum powers is about 32 percent points.

By exploring the Brazilian case in more depth, I also found that bicameralism dynamics and qualified majority rules impact the emergence of oversized coalitions. With two chambers elected through different electoral rules, parties in Brazil are often unable to secure the same seat share in both houses; to make things worse for presidents, party switching is still widespread in the country. In this context, as my results uncovered, differences in the number of seats controlled by the government in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate positively affect the emergence of oversized coalitions. Finally, as some bills require supermajorities to be approved, such as constitutional amendments, reformist presidents also tend to form and maintain larger coalitions: the maximum value in this variable predicts increases by up to 10 percentage points on the probability of an oversized coalition being formed.

Taken together, these results show a more nuanced picture of why and how presidents form multiparty government coalitions in Latin America: often, obtaining a legislative majority is not enough to implement their legislative agendas, and so they might resort to a complementary strategy: to form larger coalitions. And presidents with greater legislative power, at the beginning of their terms or facing fragmented party systems, are in the best position to pursue such a strategy. In this way, both electoral and programmatic factors, as well as the institutional context, become key to understand variations in the size and the composition of government coalitions in presidential countries.

[2] The criteria employed to identify a government coalition is the party affiliation of the ministers of the principal ministerial portfolios in each country – taking into account that ministers are not always recruited due to their connections or their congressional influence, and that in some cases they are not recognized by their parties as legitimate representatives of the same.

This is a guest post by Johannes Freudenreich, Postdoctoral research fellow at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft at the University of Munich. It is based on an recent article in Latin American Politics and Society

In the beginning of the 21st century, prospects of Latin American presidential democracies were good. The dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s had vanished, economies were constantly growing, and comprehensive social welfare programs were implemented. Many political scientists link these successes to the ability of Latin American presidents to form, maintain and manage cabinet coalitions (Cheibub 2007). The differences between presidential and parliamentary systems of government seemed to have become rather marginal. Both presidents and prime ministers achieved legislative majorities by forming broad cabinet coalitions and critics of the presidential form of democracy, such as Juan Linz (1994), seemed to be proven wrong. However, soon presidential impeachments became the new pattern of political instability in the region (Pérez Liñan 2007). Cabinet reshuffling remains constantly high and broad corruption schemes, directly linked to coalition politics, have been disclosed, such as the Mensalão Scandal in Brazil, where the ruling party of President Lula da Silva used illegal side payments to secure the legislative support of members of the ruling coalition.

My recent article in Latin American Politics and Society takes a systematic look at the formation of cabinet coalitions in presidential systems over the past 25 years. It analyzes the extent to which presidents in 13 Latin American countries have formed coalitions that increase their law-making capabilities, and whether presidents form coalitions tailored to find majorities in Congress especially when presidents have low independent influence over policy based on their institutional law-making powers.

The study complements the perspective that cabinet coalitions are largely an instrument for finding legislative majorities with the idea that presidents use cabinet posts to honor pre-electoral support. The reason is the following: presidential elections provide strong incentives for electoral coordination because they tend to favor two-candidate competition. In a multi-party setting, this means that parties have incentives to form pre-electoral coalitions to present joint presidential candidates. When negotiating pre-electoral pacts, parties are likely to agree on how to share the benefits of winning including cabinet posts. After the election, presidents find it difficult to abandon these agreements as they need the trust and support of other parties within and outside of their coalition during their presidential term. Thus, it is expected that cabinet coalitions are likely to be based on the electoral team of presidents and that other legislative parties are invited to join the cabinet only additionally to parties of the existing pre-electoral coalition.

The study further argues that parties attractive as pre-electoral coalition partners are not necessarily the ones that would achieve cabinet participation if the negotiations of cabinet posts were an unconstrained post-electoral process. For example, in a one-dimensional policy space, extreme parties, parties more extreme than the president to the median legislator, are relatively unimportant for legislative decisions and thus unlikely to be included in the cabinet for legislative reasons. In a presidential race, however, extreme parties can provide valuable votes and campaign resources and therefore have far stronger blackmailing power. Furthermore, presidential contests produce a strong antagonism between the president and the parties of the president’s electoral rivals. Since the president’s survival in office is not contingent on the support of other parties in parliament, parties that present a strong presidential candidate are likely to be excluded from the cabinet, even if their inclusion is rational from a lawmaking perspective. It is therefore expected that the party of the runner-up is generally excluded from the presidential cabinet and that the overall explanatory power of variables of legislative bargaining increases once one controls for the effects of pre-electoral coalition formation and competition.

The study empirically evaluates this argumentation on the basis of so-called conditional logit models, presenting a new empirical strategy to analyze cabinet formation under this type of regime. The tests are conducted on a new dataset of 107 democratic cabinets in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Based on the new method and data, this study presents the most comprehensive test yet of the determinants of the partisan composition of presidential cabinets.

The most note-worthy empirical results are:

First, presidents try to form majority coalitions, but it is the upper house majority not the lower house majority which makes cabinet coalitions significantly likely to from. One potential explanation for this phenomenon is that there are generally fewer parties in the upper than in the lower chamber, due to the disproportionality of electoral systems used to elect upper chambers in Latin America. Thus, the president’s party is often overrepresented in the upper house, which makes it easier for presidents to find majorities. Furthermore, upper chambers are generally strong in Latin America (Nolte and Llanos 2004), and controlling an upper chamber is often sufficient for the president to prevent a veto override.

Second, contrary to expectations in the literature, extensive presidential decree powers decrease the probability of the occurrence of cabinets which control only a minority of seats in the lower house of congress. A potential explanation for this phenomenon is similar to the argument developed by Strøm (1990) for minority governments in parliamentary systems. Parties prefer to stay in opposition when the government has a weak independent influence on policy. The other explanation is that pre-electoral coalition formation is more prevalent when presidents’ institutional authority is high, as political actors make a relatively simple calculation about the benefits and the costs of coordination in presidential elections. The more powerful the president, the higher the incentives for pre-electoral coalition formation (Hicken and Stoll 2008; Freudenreich 2013). And if the a coalition is in power anyway, it is easier to extend this coalition to secure a majority in the lower house of congress.

Third, considerations of governability and pre-electoral bargaining describe two distinct yet compatible sets of factors that influence cabinet formation in presidential systems. Many cabinet coalitions in Latin America are congruent or extended versions of the pre-electoral coalition of the president and parties of the main presidential competitor are generally excluded from the cabinet, but these factors are distinct to the incentives of legislative bargaining. The explanatory power of variables associated with governability increases once variables of pre-electoral bargaining are included in the statistical model. For example, cabinet coalitions are more likely to form when they include the median party in the lower chamber of congress, but this effect is only statistically significant when one controls for the effects of pre-electoral bargaining.

Overall, the paper tries to show that an inclusive approach is necessary to study coalition dynamics in presidential systems. Pre-electoral commitments strongly affect cabinet formation and thereby also confound the relationship between cabinet formation, legislative bargaining and governability.

Hicken, Allen, and Heather Stoll. 2008. Electoral Rules and the Size of the Prize: How Political Institutions Shape Presidential Party Systems. Journal of Politics 70, 4: 1109–27.

Linz, Juan J. 1994. Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does it Make a Difference? In The Failure of Presidential Democracy: The Case of Latin America, ed. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 3–89.

On Sunday, El Salvador held its presidential run-off election. With 99 per cent of electoral precincts counted, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the vice-president of the current incumbent, Maurico Funes, and the candidate of the left-leaning Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), has 50.11 per cent of the vote, compared to 49.89 per cent for Norman Noel Quijano, of the right-leaning Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA), the party who had been in power for twenty years between 1989 and 2009.

With only 6,634 votes between the two candidates, the result has hung in the balance for over a day. However, on Monday afternoon, the country’s electoral tribunal announced that Sánchez’s lead is now irreversible, although the electoral authorities have yet to declare Sánchez as the winner. Quijano has also claimed victory and asserted that he will not allow “fraud of the Chavista or Maduro style like in Venezuela.”

In fact, Sánchez, a former guerrilla commander during El Salvador’s bitter civil war (1979-1992) who had overseen a cautious campaign, light on ideology, was initially expected to be the clear winner in the run-off, but Quijano successfully capitalized on unrest in Venezuela and Sánchez’s apparent support for Nicolás Maduro. During the tail end of the run-off campaign, Quijano ran daily TV adverts with coverage of the civil unrest in Venezuela, which portrayed Sánchez as a dangerous and subversive communist, and which raised the specter of Chavista-like nationalizations in El Salvador should Sánchez win.

This tactic, together with his hard-line stance on gang crime, enabled Quijano to recruit moderate conservatives who had previously supported Antonio Saca (the third placed candidate from the first round).

Sánchez’s victory, which will give the FMLN their second consecutive term in power, does not come without problems. The closeness of the result suggests that some type of legal challenge is inevitable, further eroding Sánchez’s already weak electoral mandate. This will most likely force Sánchez to compromise his policy position, thereby angering the more ideological wing of the FMLN. Not to mention the fact that he takes over a country with dizzyingly high levels of poverty and inequality, and with one of the highest murder rates in the world.

*UPDATE: A vote count is now under way in El Salvador, given the closeness of the result and apparent irregularities with 14 ballot boxes.